hol, in however small quantities, is a poison and a
menace to personal and national health and prosperity. Yet during this
very period the per capita consumption of every kind of alcoholic
beverage has increased. Whereas 16.49 gallons of spirituous liquors
were consumed per capita of population in 1896, 22.27 gallons were used
in 1906. Obviously the results of methods hitherto in vogue for
combating alcoholism are disappointing.

Why this paradoxical relation of precept to practice? Why is this, the
most hygiene-instructed country in the world, the Elysium of the
patent-medicine and cocaine traffic? If we have only the expected
divergence of achievement from ideal, then there is nothing for us to
do but to congratulate ourselves and posterity upon the part played by
compulsory legislation in committing all states and territories to
hygiene instruction in all public schools. If, on the other hand, our
disappointment is due to ineffective method, then the next step is to
change our method.

The chief purpose of school hygiene has hitherto been not to promote
personal and community health, but to lessen the use of alcohol and
tobacco. Arguments were required against whisky, beer, cigars, and
cigarettes. As the strongest arguments would probably make the most
lasting impression upon the school child and the best profits for
author and bookseller, writers vied with one another in the rhetoric
and hyperbole of platform agitation. What effect would it have upon you
if you were exhorted frequently during the next eight years to avoid
tobacco because a mother once killed a child by washing its head in
tobacco water? What is the effect on the mind of a boy or a girl who
sees that the family doctor, the minister, the teacher, the judge, the
governor, the President, and the philanthropist use tobacco and
alcoholic beverages, when taught that "boys who use tobacco and
alcoholic beverages will find closed in their faces the doors to
strength, good health, skill in athletics, good scholarship, long life,
best companions, many business positions, highest success"? It is
probably true that "a boy once drank some whisky from a flask and died
within a few hours." But that story is about as typical of boys and of
whisky as that a boy once drank whisky from a flask and did not die for
ninety years afterwards, or that George Washington drank whisky and
became the Father of his Country.

How special pleading has dominated the teaching of s